Book Review: The Possible

What if...no one knows the truth about you? It's been thirteen years since Kaylee's infamous birth mother, Crystal, received a life sentence for killing Kaylee's little brother in a fit of rage. Once the center of a cult-following for her apparent telekinetic powers, nowadays nobody's heard of Crystal. Until now, when a reporter shows up at Kaylee's house and turns her life upside down, offering Kaylee the chance to be part of a high-profile podcast investigating claims that Crystal truly did have supernatural mind powers. But these questions lead to disturbing answers as Kaylee is forced to examine her own increasingly strange life, and make sense of certain dark and troubling coincidences...(goodreads)

An unreliable narrator makes for a suspenseful read!

Plot: Last year, I was lucky to read The Leavingand absolutely loved the mystery. While The Possible sounded a lot different, I was excited to see what mystery Altebrando could weave. Kaylee had been hiding a secret from literally everyone, she had been adopted and her birth mother was imprisoned for killing her infant brother. Things got weird when a podcast contacted Kaylee to do a local exposee on the crime and highlighted a possible paranormal connection. I thoroughly enjoyed how Altebrando kept me on my toes, she constantly made me doubt what direction I thought the book was taking. Around the 3/4ths mark, Altebrando started throwing in theories and plot twists that didn't hold much weight given that they was introduced so late in the novel. It was a pretty solid novel until that point, and that was because the red herrings became too obvious and took me out of the mystery.

Character: I'm sure Kaylee will polarize a lot of readers, personally she came off too strong. Kaylee saw the world through the lens of an 80's high school movie; there were the jocks, the ditzes, the nerds, and none of them were cool enough to exist in her realm. She had her sights on a boy to whom she had never spoken and knew that he would ask her to prom and they would get their happy ending, despite the fact that said boy was already in a committed relationship. Besides that, the secondary characters were very much in the background; they only existed when Kaylee chose to acknowledge them. Altebrando made a statement about Kaylee's perspective, but I believe that it was too late and too brief to make the character self-aware.

Worldbuilding: Kaylee viewed everyone as stereotypes, which was how I read the city and its people. One aspect I really clung to was the podcast culture. The podcast that Kaylee was featured on, The Possible, was very similar to NPR/This American Life's Serial and I was fascinated by how that culture was presented in The Possible.

Short N Sweet: The Possible introduced an interesting premise with twists and turns at every corner, maybe there were too many twists and turns.